The Great Depression

During the Spring of 1933 articles like this one began to appear in the magazines and newspapers across the country serving to inform their readers about the creation of an additional Federal agency that was designed to help take some of the sting out of the Great Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal intended to take a hefty percentage of unmarried young men off the streets of 16 American cities, feed them, clothe them and line their pockets with $30.00 a month for their labor. W.W. II created a host of other demands requiring Federal funding, and so Congress voted to dissolve the C.C.C. in 1942.

A columnist writing for the business magazine New Outlook following the first nine months of the New Deal, weighed carefully all the assorted alphabet agencies and edicts that President Roosevelt created in hopes that the U.S. economy would once more spring to life. He concluded that there was nothing to look forward to and compared FDR to the con-men on the street corners who scam the passersby into playing their shell games; difference being that FDR's shells were both empty.

Click here to read about the first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration.

"Blue Eagle, symbol of the National [Industrial] Recovery Act, is probably one of the best known figures in the country today. Gripping bolts of lightening and a cog wheel in its claws it now hovers over 95 percent of industrial America advertising the success of the first major move of the New Deal... With only one year behind it, it has brought about the cooperation of 2,300,000 employers and 60,000,000 consumers."

- so runs the introductory paragraph for this 1934 article that marked the first anniversary of the National Recovery Administration. This short-lived agency was the brainchild of FDR's administration that was shot down by the Supreme Court in 1935. Although this article is filled with praise for the NRA, it would not be very long before the editors of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE assumed a more suspicious approach when reporting on this president's efforts to repair the damaged economy.

A great observer of the Washington merry-go-round, columnist Jay Franklin (1897 – 1967) pointed out in this article that there are Federal agencies entrusted with the sorts of information that, when analyzed properly, will serve both as an indicator of prosperity and of misery as they spread or recede across the land. "...if one wished to know whether the people were desperate and suffering there were certain matters which would demonstrate it:"

"the number of evictions, the number of illegitimate births, the number of articles pawned or redeemed, the growth or decline of unnatural vice, the number of suicides. Information on these points, if currently accessible, in compact statistical form, would show whether the people were socially happy or economically satisfied."

By the year 1937 it became a concern that an eighth of all those admitted to the nation's state-run mental hospitals were between the ages of 15 through 24. On a similar note, it was revealed that 40% of employable youth were entirely unable to secure positions during this this same period. These matters were made known as a result of the efforts put forward by the Youth Commission of the American Council of Education - a group that began compiling such data in 1935.